Summary

  • AGCOM says its cross-border caller-number filter blocked about 191 million calls in January–August 2026, while two separate proceedings ended in €822,500 of fines.
  • The release counts filtered call attempts and describes number-assignee enforcement; it does not report unique victims, fraud losses prevented or a measured false-positive rate.

A block counter is not a victim counter. Italy’s communications regulator, AGCOM, says its filter stopped about 191 million calls in the first eight months of 2026. The same 12 October release reports €822,500 in fines against Retelit Digital Services S.p.A. and Tekmind S.r.l. Those headline figures sit at different points in the enforcement chain: one is a network filtering total; the other is a pair of company sanctions.

The regulator says decisions 229/26/CONS and 230/26/CONS, both dated 23 September, imposed fines of €700,000 and €122,500 respectively. It names the two companies but does not match either company to an amount or set out each case’s detailed conduct. AGCOM says the proceedings concerned number assignees that failed to verify numbers used by call centres, including spoofed numbers, and to manage assigned numbers diligently. The release traces the supervisory activity to November 2025 and says it followed numerous reports. AGCOM’s announcement does not provide appeal or collection status.

The filter addresses a different control point. Under Delibera 106/25/CONS, incoming calls from abroad are blocked when they misuse Italian numbering to identify their origin or fail international numbering recommendations. The fixed-number phase followed three months after publication; the mobile phase followed after six. Genuine customers roaming abroad with Italian mobile numbers are excepted. AGCOM’s August 2025 implementation notice identifies international carriers at foreign-network interfaces as the relevant border operators, working with mobile providers to identify roaming users.

For January–August 2026, AGCOM attributes roughly 38 million blocks to calls presenting Italian fixed numbers, 148 million to Italian mobile numbers, and 4.6 million to non-compliant international numbers. The rounded components total 190.6 million, consistent with the roughly 191 million headline. The authority says the total was 7.2% of international calls, or about 790,000 daily. These are attempts classified by route and caller-number conditions; the figure does not establish what was said, who answered, whether a call was fraudulent or whether anyone suffered harm.

AGCOM compares 1–18 November 2025, before the mobile phase, with the later period: international calls presenting Italian mobile caller IDs fell from 26.8 million to 1.2 million a day, a reported 95% decline. Overall international traffic fell from 34 million to 11 million daily, about two-thirds. The regulator describes an initial shift to foreign caller IDs and says their volume later returned quickly to previous levels; it says this “appears” to show foreign numbers are ineffective for teleselling and telemarketing in Italy.

The release does not provide a controlled counterfactual, so the comparison alone cannot isolate the filter’s causal effect.

The control boundary matters. AGCOM’s May 2025 account says domestic calls that start and end in Italy were a separate technical workstream. The border filter therefore does not amount to a general solution for caller-ID spoofing. AGCOM says blocked-call reports helped it trace call centres and operators it considered non-compliant, linking the carrier-side filter to its later number-assignee cases. That is the regulator’s account of the operational bridge, not proof that every blocked attempt was a scam.

The release does not report an independently audited block count, an overblocking rate, unique campaigns or victims, consumer outcomes after blocking, losses avoided, company-by-company findings, or quantified results for domestic spoofing. Those omissions limit what the 191 million can support: it is evidence of filtering activity at a network boundary, not a verified measure of fraud prevented.

AGCOM’s May 2025 announcement sets out the staged fixed and mobile rollout and the separate domestic-origin workstream.